from the and-yet-they'll-do-it-again dept

Just about a year ago, a court in the UK found OiNK's operator, Alan Ellis, not guilty of criminal charges for running the community. Even though plenty of people had pointed out from the very beginning that it was crazy to charge Ellis with criminal charges for actions by people in the community, prosecutors still went through with it. What was even more amazing is that they continued to try to do the same thing to others as well. In the summer of 2009, we wrote about how UK police arrested the operator of the FileSoup community based entirely on claims by the entertainment industry, which showed a near total lack of understanding of the basic technology at play. It turns out that law enforcement pushed forward with the case, despite the fact that they did no investigating on their own and simply accepted the industry's claims as fact, despite numerous errors. Thankfully, the courts recognized all of this and noted that these criminal charges probably never should have been brought and dropped the case against two of the admins of the site. At what point do law enforcement folks realize that the entertainment industry is a biased party and that you can't just accept everything they say as fact?

Reader Comments

And the result will just be the industry pouring more money into judicial campaigns so they can make sure the law just rubber stamps everything they want. The law doesn't matter when the people with the money just buy what they want the result to be.

Re: Face The FACT

robably around the same time that these industries stop calling themselves FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft)
and start calling themselves FICTION
Federation of Idiots Continually Trying to Introduce Obnoxious New (laws)

Bogus Criminal Lawsuit Against filesharing site Admins

I am the owner of filesoup.com and one of the accused who have had to endure this complete and utter fiasco.

From the moment the police threatened to break down my front door, barged into my home and then arrested me 18 months ago, they have continuingly and consistently ignored the procedures set out in PACE, both the police and FACT have harrassed and fobbed me off with excuses or simply ignored every inquiry I've made about this case throughout.

They have not even bothered to investigate my official IPCC complaints about the police actions and inactions and basically just put me through as much crap as they could, it has without question, been totally vexatious to the extreme.

Re: Re: Bogus Criminal Lawsuit Against filesharing site Admins

Even if it did (and it doesn't - the files hosted by the site are perfectly legal), that wouldn't excuse the actions of the police. Typical of an AC here to try and deflect from wrongdoing by authorities in order to make his point.,

One of the benefits of living in a supposedly free society is that due process is followed and the average citizen has protection from unfair police actions that would be acceptable in a totalitarian state. One of the downsides of living in a free society is that those who would do wrong are free to do so, unless prosecuted under the law. When that happens the accused are not guilty until found guilty by a court of law.

I'm sorry that living in a free society offends your own values so much.

Re:

I heavily doubt that. Oh, I'm sure they would like to, but it wouldn't work and would probably backfire heavily. There's no doubting the US control over here in the UK, but to slap it up as official "US Orders" would cause absolute murder and a serious backlash, not to mention far too much scrutiny.

According to an ancient Pew Internet & American Life Project report dated 2005 said that "About 36 million Americans—or 27% of internet users—say they download either music or video files and about half of them have found ways outside of traditional peer-to-peer networks or paid online services to swap their files, according to the most recent survey of the Pew Internet & American Life Project."